


Wooing for Dummies

by Major



Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: F/M, Friends to Lovers, Humor, Love, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-03
Updated: 2017-11-03
Packaged: 2019-01-21 01:42:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12446800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Major/pseuds/Major
Summary: Abby doesn't know what is going on with Kevin, but she's pretty sure he's trying to kill her.





	Wooing for Dummies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thinlizzy2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinlizzy2/gifts).



The first time Kevin almost killed Abby, she took it in stride.  It was her fault for not monitoring him when he was standing so close to a microwave with a spoon in his hand.  It was an honest mistake, and she learned early on to allow him a generous amount of those in all shapes and inappropriately large logo boob sizes.  The second time was more deliberate.

The team was on location in Dust Bowl, New Mexico, a small desert town, investigating why the inhabitants had all but fled overnight, abandoning all of their belongings after the appearance of a paranormal entity that the mayor who called them for help described as The Dry Death.  Not an inviting moniker.  No one was stitching that on a pillow, though there probably would have been plenty of people willing to be its prison pen pal.

The mayor flat-out refused to return even to give them a short tour, so Erin was carrying her phone around to FaceTime with him while he gave them the tour from the cowardly screen of his iPhone.

They were in an old bar that got Abby excited about all the destructive force of the poltergeist they were after before Mayor Tyler informed them that the Skunked Saloon always looked like it was recently hit by a tornado and left with a two dollar reconstruction budget.  Should have seen that one coming.  The proof was in the name, really.

There was a basement access where the storage and industrial freezers were, but it was unnaturally black down there despite the sun being high in the sky.  The light from the ground floor wasn’t penetrating the darkness below.  Impenetrable darkness was definitely the kind of paranormal anomaly that excited Abby.  She was grinning down into it when Tyler told them that only one person could go down there, because every time a group had tried, no one had come back up.  The sense of adventure got squashed like a penny under a train at the prospect of a solo journey down there in that hell basement.

She was about to propose drawing straws, possibly to cheat and save herself for the greater good, when that plan took a pie to the face.

“Abby can do it,” Kevin volunteered her.  Like an ass.

She looked over her shoulder at him sharply.  She knew they should have left him back at the motel (also abandoned) where they had left their things.  “What?  Why me?”

Holtzmann whistled, legs stretching out in front of her as she took several backwards paces away in silent agreement with Kevin that someone that wasn’t her going down there was a good idea, because Holtzmann was about as subtle as a shark in an inflatable pool.  Patty’s guilt wasn’t as commendable as it could have been since it came with a large dose of still-not-helping.  Erin even took a tiny step to the side, eyes (not so) casually averting to the wall with the dartboard hanging crookedly.  No support there.  Traitor.

Kevin shooed her like she was a Pekingese refusing to pee so they could go back inside, even though the gesture came with a bright smile that crinkled his eyes behind his empty glasses frames.

“You can do it.  Go on.”  And the bastard even gave her a little shove forward.

Abby pulled her shoulder away, annoyed, but looking at the wimps gathered together tightly, it was obvious that it was going to be her or no one now that they had reached a group consensus.  Thanks a lot, Kevin.

She huffed and grabbed the flashlight and equipment she needed to blast the thing if it came at her.  “Fine, but if I die down there, I will wake you all up with an ectoplasm sliming every morning for the rest of your cowardly lives.”

“I look forward to it,” Kevin said, and she really almost blasted him in his cheerful, oblivious face.

 

She survived.

Barely.

The ghost was locked away safely, the heavy darkness in the basement dispersed with normal streams of light again, and they walked to the hearse with one ghost down and a whole town’s worth left to go.  Kevin didn’t seem to mind that she was drenched in ghost snot, because he wrapped an arm around her shoulders as they stepped out of the bar.

“Great job, Abby,” he said, out-sunshining the sun.

_Get slimed, Kevin_ , she thought behind a tightly returned smile.

****

His kindly decisions to put her in harm’s way didn’t end there.

He joined them all around Dust Bowl despite her unsubtle suggestions that he stay behind at the motel and wait for them.

“I’d rather stay with you,” he’d said, and okay—she figured being left behind at the motel would have been boring and dangerous for him since they didn’t know where all of the entities were at any given moment.  Of course he’d want to stay with the team.

They split up to knock out a few ghosts simultaneously, and she hadn’t realized he had decided to stick with her (to Erin’s disappointment, she was sure) until he laughed loudly at a painting of kittens playing pool in a haunted house she entered and nearly blasted him with her Neutrona Wand as she spun around screaming.

“Do you think I could get Mike Hat to play pool with me?  Or can dogs not hold pool sticks like cats?” he asked.

With some reluctance, since he could use a good ray blast sometimes, she holstered the weapon.  “Quiet.  No more words.  Think in your head.  Don’t even breathe either.  Breathe in your head too.”

He obligingly took a deep breath, cheeks puffed out, and held it.

She let him tag along in the next cafe and house she checked out even though she often bumped into him when a spirit popped out of a jukebox or flew out of a toilet like a Jack-in-the-Box, because he was always right behind her like a giant corporeal shadow.  The fourth time it happened, after she finished sucking a ghost into captivity, she turned to see he was ducking behind her and still seemed to loom a foot taller.

She threw her arms up incredulously.  “I offer no coverage for you, Kevin!  None!  What’s your deal—does my ass have a magnet on it?”

He stretched to his full height and grinned down at her.  “Would you like me to check?”

Squinting up at him, she tried to work him out.  “The thing is, I can’t tell if you’re sincere or being cheeky.”

“Which of my cheeks are you talking about?”

“See, you’re doing it again…”

Before her frustration could get any momentum, a bright green spirit zoomed through the wall and cackled towards them, and they got too busy running for their lives to carry on the conversation.  They survived, no thanks to Kevin.  He kept alternating between chasing the ghost and running from it, shouting, “It’s over here! – Abby! – It’s got me! – Sending it your way, Abby!”

It ended in the ghost being vacuumed, and both of them splat on the floor.  Abby was wedged halfway under a dusty piano with her butt sticking out.

“Don’t see any magnets,” Kevin said where he moved to squat beside her to help her up.

“Shut up!”

After the first few days in Dust Bowl, she started to notice a pattern.  If Mayor Tyler’s unhelpful face popped up on Erin’s phone with more tips from the evacuated citizens, Kevin’s input was consistently advice to let Abby handle it, or send her in first into whatever creepy cellar or attic needed a good de-ghosting.  ‘Abby can do it’ this and ‘Abby should do it’ that.

By the time, they got back to the motels that night, she was positive that something was going on with him.  When she got out of the shower, she joined the other women in Erin’s room to debrief on the day’s events.  It was a small, crappy room, same as all the others: narrow bed, a TV from the 90’s and furniture that would have looked outdated in the _18_ 90’s.  Kevin was probably already konked out in his own room, snoring and recovering from all the energy he expended nearly getting her killed all week.

They were standing around the little folding table with the wobbly leg that had food spread out all over it talking about the exciting captures of the day, and yeah-yeah-yeah, that was all super, _go team!_ , but Abby had bigger problems.

She told them all about his increasingly weird behavior and hyper focus on following her around and putting her in harm’s way.  Holtzmann started stuffing potato chips in her mouth faster, cheeks full like a hamsters as she talked, like the tale of her impending murder was great entertainment fodder.

“You guys, I think Kevin has it in for me,” she stressed, trying to be serious.  “Has anyone checked his desk drawers back at the office?  I think he’s got an insurance claim on my life or something.  I’m telling you, that guy wants me _dead._ ”

Erin dropped her head to the side in mocking disbelief, and in her defense, Kevin did seem far more likely to sprout fur and become an actual puppy than show violence towards anyone.  When, you know, he wasn’t possessed.

“What are you talking about?”

“He’s trying to kill me, Erin!  I’ve gotta watch my back.  I’m pretty sure I could take him one-on-one, but he’s setting up some tricky dominoes here.”

A startlingly loud flush of the toilet in the connecting bathroom was followed by the faucet turning on and off.  Before any of them could grab for one of their weapons to get the ghost haunting the plumbing, the door swung all the way open and Kevin strode out.

Abby narrowed her eyes on him.

“Were you using the restroom in there this whole time?” she asked, making a face.  “The door was cracked open.”

“Yeah, I had to go number two, and you should never do that alone.  Dangerous,” he clarified in a way that was only clear to him.  “Elvis died on the toilet, you know.  You can strain your brain.  I tried to quit, but it’s a hard habit to break.”

Nope.  Abby had reached peak-Kevin about eight hours ago, and this was just overflow now, running over the edge of a full cup.  She couldn’t do it.

Patty shook her head.  “I need you to announce yourself when you’re pooping in my vicinity.  I don’t want to be walking in on that.”

He agreed with a jovial nod and jumped up and on the bed, stretching his long body that the short twin mattress refused to fully support with him completely stretched out.

Holtzmann’s chin lifted in curiosity.  “Tell me more about toilet deaths.”

“No,” Erin objected quietly with a short shake of her head.  “Nope.  That was enough.  Of that.”

Kevin was laid out on his side across the bed, head propped up with an arm, looking like a beached surfer that needed to be thrown back into his natural habitat.  He looked over at Abby confused and asked, “Am I the Kevin you were talking about?”

No point in denying it.  His silent deuces had gone under the radar, but they’d all been talking loudly enough to be heard loud and clear in the bathroom.

“Yeah, I’m onto you, big guy.”  She poked two fingers at her eyes and swung them accusingly back his way.  “I know a passive murder plot when I see one.  I watch _Dateline_.  I’m not going for a hike or taking you up on scuba diving, you cliff-shoving, air tank saboteur!”

He looked genuinely baffled as he pushed his glasses back up his nose.  “I would never hurt you, Abby.”

The neighbors of serial killers always said that they seemed like the nicest people in the world; they never would have suspected that they had twenty skeletons buried under their house and a basement that looked like the structural personification of _The Cell_.

“Whatever you say, buddy.  Just know I’m locking my door tonight and setting up booby traps that would dethrone Macaulay Culkin as the reigning king of trip wires.  You shall not pass!”  She swept out of the room and into her own next door, promptly abandoning the DIY security measures in lieu of the much more inviting idea of lying down and going to sleep.

She would have to trust that Kevin was either not secretly out to get her or at least feared the same fate that befell the Sticky Bandits enough to scare him away for the night.

The hunt, coordination, and capture of the ghosts was where the excited energy started to circle inside Abby like a propeller, threatening to carry her up and off with the frenzied anticipation of something going wrong that needed fixing or going right and requiring celebration, preferably in the form of alcohol (not Holtzmann’s concoctions; that last glass sprouted a tiny heart in her liver just to give it a heart attack) and music with the girls.  And Kevin.  At least, before he had it in for her, that slippery gentle giant.  Being in the thick of things was the best feeling, freeing in its demand for her to be present, not wandering somewhere in the past over mistakes that couldn’t be righted or straying towards future problems that couldn’t be addressed yet anyway.

But the preshow, as it were, was one of her favorite parts about game day eve.  Tomorrow they were attacking a particularly tricky area: readings said there were ten-plus entities holed up in there doing God knew what.  She was preparing for the raid with one leg curled under her and the other hanging off the edge of the bed in her motel room with a towel laid out in front of her and an assortment of weapons, new and old, spread over the surface to be cleaned.  It was a soothing process that took the edge off the apprehension that threatened to rise up before they jumped into something with the potential to turn her hair white again.

What they did was dangerous after all, even when it was the most thrilling thing in the world.  It paid to take the time to clear her head when she had the luxury of doing so.

A soft knock at the door was quickly followed by Kevin popping his head in.

She picked up a clean rag and wagged it at him.  “If you’re here for another attempted murder, you’re going to have to wait.  I’ve gotta get these cleaned and ready before we hit the motherlode.  It’s going to be crawling with spirits.  I’ll need this stuff working, because I’ll have a lot more than you trying to kill me tomorrow.  Okay, buddy?”

He came inside and closed the door after him, assuring her matter-of-factly, hands in his pockets, “I don’t want to kill you.”

Her eyebrows shot up and explained to her hairline how skeptical they were at his alleged lack of bloodthirst.  “No?  You care to take a lie detector test?  You’ve got a sneaky face, Kevin.  And I’m not getting found in your basement wearing your grandma’s sweater, decomposing across from you at a kid’s table, hosting tea parties for all the other dead people you dragged down there.”

“I don’t have a basement, and I don’t like tea.  I’d set you up in the kitchen and have a Powerade party.”

“I—”  She shook her head and raised the ghost phaser she was cleaning in his general direction.  “I will blast you, Kev.  Law says I can.  Pretty sure.”

Unconcerned, he came over and sat across from her on the bed on the other side of the towel.  He pulled his phone out, started a Beasts of Mayhem song, and set it down beside them.

“Oh,” she started, surprised and sarcastic.  Heavy metal wasn't exactly conducive to the mood she was trying to set while she chilled out.  “That’s relaxing.  Thanks for that.”

He nodded, happy to oblige, his sarcasm detector still entirely out of order with no hope of repair.  “You talk about their concert a lot.  I don’t care for the music myself, but you’re welcome.”

“Kevin!” she objected, setting the phaser aside and wiping her hands on the clean rag before reaching for another weapon to check and shine.  “I talk about that concert, because it was the first time we caught a ghost.  It was exciting, and trust me when you spend your whole life trying to do something, very memorable.  I don’t care about their music.  Except to not like it; I care in that direction.”

“Oh.”

She waved at the phone.  “Put something you like on.  Come on, we’ll work without our ears bleeding.”

Kevin turned sharp eyes to her ears at the same time he reached up and pat a hand over his to check for this alleged bleeding, but Abby didn’t explain.  Sometimes it was better to let Kevin work things out for himself and file away that idiom in his knowledge bank.  With so many empty vaults.  Progress.

The beginning strains of Gary Jules’ ‘Mad World’ started from the speaker on his phone.

“Always cheers me up.  It’s about his birthday and how happy he is.”

The moody music playing did not capture that assessment.  At all.

“I… don’t think so?”

He pointed at the phone and quoted the lyrics, “’The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.’  He loves death stuff.  Like you.  So he’s happy.”

Nooope.

Shaking her head, she changed the song to something less likely to induce a sudden depressive episode and waved at the weapons.  “Make yourself useful, will you?”

He went for the biggest gun that packed the deadliest punch if used incorrectly, of course.

“Not that one, not that one!  It’ll be hard to round up ghosts if I’m busy trying to super glue my head back on my neck.  Here, clean this.”  She handed him a thin silver laser as short and slender as a pencil that highlighted a ghost’s outline and, to her knowledge, did not have the potential to slice her in half if he swung it around carelessly.

He rubbed it down no less than five seconds before shaking the bed with a rough shudder.  He puzzled down at the laser.  “It just zapped me.”

She glanced up at him absently.  “Did it hurt?”

“On a scale of one to ten, I’m at a two… thousand?  Is that normal?”

Her attention swung back to him with more focus.  “Is sudden excruciating pain normal?  No!  How did you even make it do that?  It’s not supposed to do that.”  She snagged it out of his hand and immediately regretted it as a sharp electric pain shot through her hand and gave her whole body a big buzz of pain.  She dropped it fast, flexing her fingers.  “Ow!  Motherf—Kevin!  You should come with hazard lights following you around in a halo, I swear to—I’d rather square off with a lion some days.”

His tripping average was far higher than a normal person.  Not even being as big as he was could account for the extent of his clumsiness, and the cloud of miniature disasters that hovered over him every day cast its shadow over anyone in his vicinity.  One of these days, she was going to force him to wear glasses with actual corrective lenses in them to save mankind from the catastrophes his blindness caused.

“Are you okay?” she asked, concerned through her frustration.  That hurt a lot, and she’d dropped it immediately.  Kevin had just kept clutching it, because—well, because he was Kevin.  “Does it hurt?”

She took his hand, flattening his palm and stretching each of his fingers out to inspect closely for signs of burns or flexibility issues.  They curled or straightened at her instruction, hand warm and pliant between hers.  He had massive paws.  Probably didn’t need a baseball glove to catch; could just go out and snatch a bowling ball out of the air with those puppies.  When she looked up, he looked entirely too contented for somebody who just took a cattle prod to the palm.  No one would accuse him of being a dweller, but still, the soft watchful ease to his expression as he looked back at her gave her pause.

She was used to Kevin’s clueless ambivalence and his happy grins (often pleasantly detached from whatever was going on), but this smile was more gentle than the others and more aware than she would have thought him capable.  That level of rare concentration in him inspired her to get to the bottom of his weird behavior before he slipped back into his default mode of being aware of a fly he was following around the room while bumping into things and little else.

“What’s with you lately?  How come you’re everywhere I turn, trying to shove me into danger?”

He looked down at their hands.  She dropped hers back to her lap, and he refocused on her.  “I wanted to make you happy.”  Before she could argue that sudden death was not the greatest leap towards that goal, he explained, “I know how much you love all this ghost stuff.  If anyone should get first dibs on the special stuff, it’s you, Abby.”

That shut her complaints down.  Surprise at the kindness made a fond smile tug at her lips.   _Aww._  She couldn’t file a restraining order with that motivation.  Still.

She frowned.  “Happiness requires being alive, Kevin, so how about we lay off on trying to thrust that happiness on me.  I’ll just—I’ll pursue that journey on my own.  For, you know, survival purposes.”

“Okay.”

She poked at the malfunctioning laser experimentally with the nozzle of her phaser, but it didn’t do anything.  “Why were you so bent on making me happy anyway?”

He tried to poke it with her but with his bare finger, and she swatted his hand away before he could make contact and hurt himself again.  “Oh, because when you love someone, it’s your job to make them happy.  But a good job, even though you don’t get paid.  Plus, I thought it might help get you to love me back.”

She set the phaser down with a short, exasperated sigh: at him for being too sweet to slap for all the grief he’d inadvertently given her lately, and at herself for ever thinking the poor guy with his brain on a milk carton somewhere could want to do her harm.

“Aw, Kevin.  That’s—You don’t have to do anything to make me care about you.  Especially accidentally killing me.  That wouldn’t have helped.  I already care.  We’re friends.  If I haven’t made that clear before, I’m sorry.  Of course I care.”

Matter-of-factly, he countered, “Yeah, but you care about me like you care about Patty and Holtz and Erin.”

She didn’t see the problem with that.  “Yeah?”

“And I care about you like the people on the covers of those books Erin reads inside science magazines: ripped bodices and gropey hands.  I want our love to match.  Like socks.  Only better.”

She nodded along as she continued cleaning the weapon she’d picked up, in the indulgent way she did when he was trying to get around to a point in his slow roundabout manner but abruptly stiffened and looked up when his words caught up to her.  There was a benign smile on his face as he looked back at her like he hadn’t just said the most ridiculous thing since he told her he wanted to buy an industrial freezer and fill it with snow in the winter so they could have snowball fights year-round.

“…What?”

“I’m happiest when you’re around, Abby.  So I’ll be extra careful not to kill you from now on, but if it’s alright with you, I’d like to keep trying to return the favor.”

“I…”

He’d picked up one of the newer devices that Holtzmann had given her and gave it a hard shake.  It bobbled with a dangerous rattle, but she was too stunned to reprimand him for it.  He looked back at her patiently for a response, and hell if she knew what to say to that.  He didn’t make sense on a good day.  This was turbo levels of bewildering.

“Uh.  Sure.”

It was a crap answer to a bizarre confession, but he smiled, all too happy to receive it and got up from the bed, taking his music with him.  “Goodnight.  Don’t let the bed bugs bite, and don’t bite your bed bugs.  Everyone should be able to sleep in peace.”

A wave was all she could muster at that, and he left her alone in a far too confused state to continue handling deadly devices.  He was…  He was just…

_“What??”_

****

Abby slept on it but found Erin as everyone was finishing their breakfast and getting ready to head out from the motel to the next ghostbusting location.  Grabbing her arm the second she stepped out of her room, Abby started dragging her away towards the ice machine at the end of the line of rooms as Kevin stepped out of his own room farther down, shirt riding up as he stretched high over his head.  He caught sight of her and waved, hand way up in the air.

She slapped a strained smile on her face with a cutoff wave of her own, and flipped around with her back to him to hiss at Erin quietly, “Kevin is being weird.  He’s pretending that he’s in love with me.”

Erin immediately snapped from foggy morning focus to the hyper wide-eyed focus she used to get when cramming for finals on a full case of soda and three pounds of Pop Rocks.  “He’s what?  What now?  Who is he in love with?  Did you say me?”

“Will you get a grip?”

Abby chanced a look over her shoulder, but Kevin wasn’t paying attention to them.  He was cleaning the space where the glass should have been in his glasses with his t-shirt, rubbing nothing.  For what?  Only God and someone as off as Kevin knew.  Maybe Pee-wee Herman.  Yeah, that guy might have known.

Erin glanced over at him, brow furrowing, and asked, “Why do you think he’s faking?”

Well, that was a stupid question.  “Because Kevin and I make as much sense as _you_ and Kevin.”

“I take offense to that.”

“Do you?  Really?  What am I supposed to do now, huh?  I’ve got the Scarecrow from _The Wizard of Oz_ drafting poetry in my honor.  That’s not hyperbole either.  I found a note under my door this morning.  Spelling is… atrocious.  And he rhymed ‘globes’ with ‘probes’, and it’s a verse that—It will not leave my memory.  It’s etched in there.”  She wagged her finger at her temple.  “In _tar_.  Was laying fresh concrete in my mind, and he went and scratched that poem in there before it dried.  And it’ll be there.  Forever.”

“Why was ‘globes’ in the poem?”  Then, more urgently, “Why ‘probes’?”

“You don’t—Erin, you don’t want to know.”

“When he was talking to you about his love…”  Erin leaned in with interest that was deeply, sadly unhealthy.  “Could he have pronounced ‘Abby’ when he meant ‘Erin’?  They're _very_ similar names.”

“They’re really not.  And you are useless.”  Abby stalked past her and headed for the hearse.

****

They were packed into the hearse on the way to the ghost rumble when Holtzmann twisted around in the passenger seat to shoot a toothy smile at Abby, wedged between Kevin and Erin in the back.

“What is this beautiful poem I just read?  Abby, is this probing limerick nonfiction?”

That taught her to leave anything lying around.  Holtzmann was worse than a curious cat.  She would try to snatch cheese from a trap if she couldn’t tell on sight the kind of cheese it was.  With a frown, Abby snatched the piece of paper from her hand and tucked it away in her pocket.

Kevin volunteered information that really didn’t need to be universally known, “I wrote that.  With my left hand.  To show the lengths I’ll go to make her happy.”  Not using his dominant hand explained why it wasn’t legible.  She had just attributed the kindergarten penmanship to it being a note from Kevin.  “More romantic.  Ah, ‘cause I’m in love with Abby.”

Holtzmann’s eyes shot to her, and Patty’s attention quickly swerved from the road ahead to their reflection in the rearview mirror.

Abby held in a groan and deserved some kind of reward for that, waving a hand and repeating dismissively, “Kevin’s in love with me.”

“Okay,” Patty said and decided the road was a safer thing to concentrate on.

Holtzmann became entirely too self-satisfied, resting her chin on her hands as she grinned at her.  “This is glorious.”

“Shut up.  Turn around.  Playing the Quiet Game now.  One, two, three, go.”

‘Glorious,’ Holtzmann mouthed silently.

****

They prepared to storm the castle—well, the entrance to the underground sewage system—in their coveralls, weapons at the ready.  Except for Kevin who was trusted with a spray bottle with water in it to spritz in ghost faces.  Abby had little faith that she wouldn’t take a squirt to the eyes before the day was done.

Before they started in, Kevin touched her elbow and told her earnestly, “I just want you to know that you fill up my heart like your perfect ass fills out those hideous coveralls.”  For the love of—  “If there is danger in there, I’ll save you and let all the others die.”

A rousing and inspirationally loving promise, to be sure.

She was gaping at him when her incredulity was talked over by Erin, “Whoa.   _All_ the others?”

Holtzmann swung her head to the side to look up at Patty.  “How are we feeling about this?  Should we kill Abby to keep Kevin from killing us to save her, or…?”

Patty was clearly not impressed with Kevin’s show of nepotism.  “We’re gonna have to consider that in private.”

Abby pinched the bridge of her nose.  “Kevin, we have to work on your compliments.  They’re _very_ threatening.”

“Okay.”  He smiled, and damn if it didn’t seem to shine a little brighter than the day before.  “I would, though.  One by one—like dominoes, I’d let them die.”

Patty pulled a face.  “Oh, we’re gonna have to bury his body _real_ deep if we’re not gonna get caught.  It’s too easy to find a carcass that big.”

This was a disaster.  Kevin was a natural disaster all on his own.  That poem was frightening.  The whole thing was leading nowhere good.

Abby waved her hands.  “Nobody is becoming a carcass!   _Kevin_ , mute.  I’ve muted you.  No more words.  None.”

He kept smiling and zipped his mouth shut compliantly, throwing away the invisible key, but he ruined it when he looked at Patty and Holtzmann and dragged one of his fingers across his throat silently, pointing at them.  That was just direct now, was what it was.

Patty snapped, “Get some shovels!”

“Should we—?” Holtz started.

“Get some shovels!”

Erin’s hands flew up into nervous fists under her chin, begging, “Ahh, don’t bury his face.”

“Nah, for real, though,” Patty leaned in close to whisper in her ear.  “Watch his back in there.  I worry about him.  You can’t be making out too much.  Y’all will get dead quick.”

Kevin was, unfortunately, in hearing range.  “Speed kissing.  Got it.”

“There won’t be any making out!”

That was it.  Abby grabbed Kevin by the arm and pulled him forward into the sewer.  The team split up at the entrance into separate tunnels, and she kept her natural disaster with her for his own protection and theirs.

They were walking for a few minutes with only the quiet drip of water echoing throughout the tunnel when Abby decided to hand him a reality check.

“You’re not in love with me, you know,” she started, but a swing of her flashlight’s beam as she glanced over her shoulder at him broke her words off into a scream.

He was loping behind her just like his footsteps told her he would be, but he had acquired a little friend somewhere along the way.

Kevin looked passively between her and the rodent he was holding like a cat in his arms.  “What’s wrong?  Is it a rat ghost?”

“It’s a _rat_ rat, isn’t that bad enough?  Why is it being so docile?  What are you, the rat whisperer?!  Put it down!”

He set it down on a pipe along the wall and released it, waving at its fat butt as it scurried off.

“Were you saying something?” he asked.

“Oh, forget it.”  She made a face and wondered how many pals that rat had down there.  “Let’s just go.”

That would have been an excellent plan if not for the blue ghost that stood nose-to-nose with her when she faced straight.  Her eyebrows were the only things that had time to react with a couple high jumps up her forehead that would have cleared hurdles before it unhinged its jaw and roared in her face.  The energy it emitted launched her up and back through the air.

She smacked into Kevin, and they both fell backwards and skid across the ground.

Kevin grabbed her shoulders and steadied her where she wobbled against his chest.  “See.  It’s good to have me as a buffer.”

Quite a buff buffer at that, but they had an angry blue ghost to chase.  It was already fleeing around the corner of the tunnel.

“Yeah, yeah, you have the width of a safety trapeze net.  Thank you.”  She hurried to her feet and reached for him.

He took her hand and stood.  “I wonder if the others are dead.  Because they don’t have me as a pillow.”

“They’re not dead!  Why are your wooing tactics so morbid!  Gah.”

She flipped around, and they ran after the ghost.

It was anybody’s guess how the ghost circled back, locked them in a chamber at the back of the tunnel and cackled away completely unseen while they were left in a dark sewer room of questionable sanitation.  The question wasn’t if it was, the question was, to what degree was the filth toxic?

“I consider this less good than optimal but not bad,” Kevin said after several minutes of trying to get the heavy metal door open failed even with the added benefit of Kevin’s considerable muscle mass and Abby’s bank of weapons strapped to her person.  Kevin spraying the knob with his water bottle had, unsurprisingly, yielded no results either.

“How is this not bad?”

They were sealed in a small underground chamber in a creepy tunnel that smelled exactly like a sewer living up to its reputation would smell.  Could things have been worse?  Sure.  So far, she still didn’t think leprechauns were real, but if one popped out at them from one of the thicker pipes along the walls, it would complete the horror show.

“We’re together.”  God help him, that seemed to make it all alright in his eyes.  “Being together is always better than being together all alone.”

She sighed but not without the fondness that always rose up when she was having a one-on-one with the guy.  “We gotta work on your sentence structure, buddy.”

More pressing than English lessons was the sudden disturbing amount of leakage coming from the ceiling.  The pipes were rusted through or peppered with cracks in enough places to make it impossible to find a totally clean spot to stand.  It was water.  That was a lucky break at least, considering where they were.

Kevin sat down on the ground against the back wall layered with long rows of pipes, and Abby went and sat down next to him.

She turned the flashlight off to conserve the battery until the rest of the team found and busted them out.  Sadly, her walkie-talkie was back at the motel; she was making checklists from now on.  It was a waiting game, and without the beam, the only light in the sealed pitch-black room came from the green and yellow glow sticks hanging from a big key ring on her hip.

Warmth pressed against her side as Kevin scooted closer and her hair stopped being splatted with cold drops of water from the ceiling.  She looked up to see that Kevin had pulled his jacket off and was holding it up to shield their heads from the leak.  He was a human grenade that tripped and had his pin pulled out every five minutes, but he was also really sweet.

She hoped the rest of the team was faring better against the ghosts down there, but by the time midnight came and went, becoming a tiny dot in the rearview mirror, she was too tired to stay up any longer to bang pipes and call out for them.  The proposal to go to sleep got Kevin to look up at her from the ground with his arms spread out in invitation.

She looked back at the door again, but it was still stuck and only stared back at her impassively, too stubborn to swing open on its own and let them out.  By then, it was freezing and too wet to bother with boundaries.

“This isn’t flirting.  It’s survival,” she clarified.

She got back down on the floor and laid out next to him up along the wall where the floor was mostly dry, accepting his offer for body heat by curling into his side and resting her arm across his chest.  His arm wrapped securely around her, big and heavy but not uncomfortably so.  It was actually pretty nice.

“Have you considered a career in being a Sleep Number bed?” she asked into his chest, cheek pressed against his t-shirt.

“No, I like being a ghostbuster.”

She couldn’t help the smile that pulled hard on her cheeks.  He was too sweet for his own good.  He must have felt the upward tug of her lips, because his arm tightened around her.

“Sweet dreams, Abby.”

“You too, Kev.”

He fell asleep with a smile on his face, the big dope.  Abby closed her eyes, settling in as the last of the glow stick ran out and left them in the dark, and in a fit of denial, did the same.

No more ghosts swept in to wreak havoc, but Abby was startled awake a few hours later by one of her recurring nightmares.  She was falling into the vortex, but in the nightmares Erin didn’t jump after her and she kept falling forever, unable to go home or claw her way up.  She jerked out of the dream and heard a low grunt in the darkness from the sharp elbow Kevin took to the chest in her haste to jump back into the waking world.

His arm had slid loosely off of her to the ground in their sleep, but he sat up with her as she pressed her back to the pipes and reached for her in the dark, catching a side boob before correcting to her shoulder with a sleepy apology.

“What’s wrong?  Is the rat back?”

Oh God.  She hadn’t even been worrying about that.  Quickly, she popped one of the glow sticks on the ring and lit the circle around them enough to at least see if any critters came crawling over to chew something unchewable.

“No.  It’s okay.  I had a bad dream.  Go back to sleep.”

Kevin was the most malleable person she ever met.  She was pretty sure she could box him up and sell him as putty, so she was surprised when he didn’t immediately listen and pulled himself up into a tired slump next to her instead.

“What was the dream about?”

She hadn’t even told Erin about the recurring nightmares, preferring to push them to the back of her mind and ignore them as soon as she escaped them.  “It doesn’t matter.”

She felt his shoulder shrug against hers more than she saw it in the yellow-green light.  “If it doesn’t matter, then tell me.”

She was prepared to dig her heels in and shut him down, but he was looking down at her with genuine interest and concern that stalled the impulse.  “I just have these nightmares sometimes.  About the vortex.  You know, the thing I fell in that turned my hair white.”

He rubbed at his eyes and they turned curious when they refocused on her.  “You’re scared of it?”

“I’m scared of leprechauns.   _That’s_ scary.  I’m concerned about the vortex.  Or about all of this really.  I just… don’t want to get lost doing something I love.”  She waved around.  Look where they were stuck for the night.  The job came with drawbacks, many of them capable of killing them if they ran into the wrong one without help.  Trying to survive Holtzmann’s inventions was hard enough.

Kevin dropped his head against the pipes.  “My Hide and Seek team lost in the finals of the tournament.”

Oh, they were done talking about her already.  Subject switch there.  Okay.

“That’s too bad, Kevin.”  She gave his knee a couple consoling pats and closed her eyes to drown him out and try to nod back off, but he went on.

“When I was a kid, my friend, Sully, was the best at Hide and Seek.  He found me no matter where I went.  A real varsity seeker.  One day, he went out on his bike, and we never saw him again.”

Abby’s eyes snapped back to him, attention sharpening.  How horrible.  Her chest tightened at the unexpected news that Kevin’s life was not, in fact, the shining golden perfection that it looked like from the outside.  She would not have put money on that one.

“That’s how I got into tournaments.  Because it reminds me of him.  When I’m seeker, I always sort of pretend I’ll find him hiding some place with everyone else playing.  I know I won’t.  But the, uh, fibromyalgia makes it worth it.”  It took Abby a second to work out that he meant ‘nostalgia’.  Unless those Hide and Seek tournaments were doling out some satisfying muscle pain.  His half-smile was reassuring and the closest thing to a glimmer of despondency that she had ever seen on him.  “You don’t have to worry about getting lost, Abby.”  He met her eyes and promised, “Even if you did, I’ll always find you.  I’m a really good seeker.”

Well, damn.  She had not been prepared for a heart-to-heart in a sewer.

Reaching out, she wrapped her hand around his arm and squeezed.  Whatever else Kevin was, his heart was huge with secret bruises all its own.

Thumb moving gently across his warm skin, she murmured, “I had no idea.”

The shadows over his face outside the immediate range of the glow stick couldn’t hide the shadow that crossed him from somewhere deeper.  “I don’t talk about it much.  It makes me feel…  What’s that word that means not happy?”

There was one thing she was glad that he had trouble remembering.  A soft smile framed her answer, “Sad.”

He pointed with a quick nod.  “That’s it!”

And just like that, he was back to grinning, eyes softening on her as his tennis racket hand came up to cover the one she had on his arm.

She guessed he wasn’t _so_ bizarre as far as suitors went, if she looked closely enough—sort of.  She watched him idly in the dimming glow of the stick still clipped to her belt: at the strong line of his jaw, the warm kindness behind the clueless veneer of his eyes, the way there was almost a visible energy of positivity vibrating around him that attracted good things to come his way.  He was a pretty man, painfully so.  Good in a way that mattered.  Loving, like she wanted even if she hadn’t thought to look his way for it before.

Kevin caught her looking and whipped a smile her way, a big one that crinkled his eyes and exposed more of his feelings than words (especially set to poetry) ever could.  Her heart reacted in a traitorous leap of interest, and she looked away before it got any other ideas.  Nope.  Nothing gross about that.

He had other ideas, though.  His fingers found her chin and turned her face back to him.  She looked, and looking set a match to the tie between their hearts that had bound them in friendship all these months.

When the flame crept up and hit her chest, it didn’t feel a thing like what she had worked to maintain in the last few weeks when Kevin started bringing her lunch when she was working too hard to leave her desk, unasked, with a perfect ratio of soup to wontons, when they’d walk to the hearse together bumping shoulders and teasing Erin, when they poked each other’s noses saying ‘not her/him!’ when Holtzmann needed a volunteer to test a new device, when Kevin accidentally made her laugh her ass off or when a smile wouldn’t unstick from her face when her laughter made him so obviously happy even at his own expense, when, when, when.  A hundred big and little things flashed through her heart and demanded notice.  There was a helpless momentum to it.  Abby had never been good at holding back.

Double damn.

“I see you,” he said, and she could never tell if he was being literal or not but his hand didn’t leave her face.  It was the only warm thing in the chamber.

“Me too, buddy,” she whispered back.

It was the vortex’s fault with its lingering nightmarish reach that she leaned in as he leaned down.  Their noses bumped gently.  Her pulse was too fast, he was too close and not close enough, and everything was just shy of perfect—

So of course the girls ran a freight train through the moment with multiple blasts against the sealed chamber door and blew it off its hinges.  It was more than convenient that they weren’t right behind it.  That was a lifesaving position, and they _had_ to work on safety protocols.

The metallic rip and clatter as it flew into the ground and rattled to a stop proved that Abby’s heart was healthier than she thought, because it didn’t give up instantly from the shock of it and leave her behind to decay.  She and Kevin pulled apart, her lips tingling with a phantom kiss that _almost_ materialized.

Erin stood in the doorway covered from her headlamp to her boots in green ectoplasm.  “There you are!  Good, you’re alive.  That was definitely the preferable outcome.”

Neither Patty or Holtzmann had any ectoplasm on them.  Seemed about right.

“Where have you guys been?” Abby asked, getting to her feet and trying to shake the cobwebs from her head that had immediately started blocking all forms of clarity out the closer Kevin had gotten.

“Busting some serious ghost ass,” Holtzmann informed them, proton gun still pointing around as she got a better look inside the chamber.

“Yeah, we got ‘em all,” Patty said.  “What have you guys been doing?”

Kevin came up to Abby’s side as she met the team in the middle and gave an account that she wouldn’t have chosen herself, personally.  “Trying to make out.  You ruined it.  I guess I’m still glad you’re alive, though.”

Erin’s eyes widened.  “You guess?”  They got wider.  “You were making out!”

Abby grabbed Kevin’s wrist and started dragging him from the room.  Finally!  “Can we go?  We’re going.”

It didn’t take that long to pack up all their gear back at the motel and get ready to go home at last, possibly with a few more ghostbusting pit stops on the return road trip.  Kevin made an excellent mule and really did have entirely too much muscle for one man.  She took the backseat between him and Holtzmann this time while Erin drove.

Patty fell asleep in the passenger seat within minutes, and her snores lured Holtzmann into a drooling doze of her own.  Abby had to push her gaping mouth off her shoulder and over to the window.

Feeling brave and stupid and just a little, tiny, microscopic bit excited, she reached over for the hand Kevin had resting on his leg and covered his fingers with hers.  He looked down and up, and even if he wasn’t a knockout, that smile—her smile—lit him up from the inside out.  And when his lips pressed against hers, that light warmed her from the outside in.

She had trouble remembering the word for ‘sad’ too when they pulled back.

Erin was watching from the rearview mirror.  “Oh, I think—I think he missed my mouth.”

“Shut _up_ , Erin.”  They smiled at each other in the mirror, but then Kevin’s lips were back on hers and she felt a lot less afraid of falling and getting lost.


End file.
